I CAN HAZ CONTRACT!

This is actually Part Two of Best Day Ever (at least for several years), I just couldn't mention it until now -- the first part, you may recall, was that I had finally acquired an agent. Now for the second, which happened on the SAME DAY:

My high/epic fantasy novel Phoenix Rising (formerly titled Fall of Saints) will be published by Baen Books (I have the contracts in front of me)!

This is an important milestone for me in several ways:

1. This is a story I first started writing back in 1992, and it's one of two very old stories that I've really, really wanted to get published.
2. This is, finally, another story set in my main universe (the same one Jason Wood calls home), although it's on a different world.
3. This is the first sale I've made essentially completely by myself. I wrote it, I submitted it, I had no intermediaries, and it's been bought.
4. The story will finally allow a lot of things in my world to become VISIBLE that really couldn't be in Digital Knight.

I don't know when Phoenix Rising will be scheduled. I have completed the first (and possibly only, we shall see) requested edits on the book and sent the edited version in, so in theory they could schedule it right now (which would probably mean this time next year).

Portal, the sequel to Threshold, has also been turned in, so I could in theory have another two-book year next year. I know that next year will see the paperback publication of Threshold.